The sharing of electronic content among computer users is now commonplace. The content may take the form of text, image, audio, or video data. Moreover, there may be related content that may need to be attached to or integrated with the existing, original content under certain circumstances. An example might be a caption or soundtrack that accompanies an image, or commentary that accompanies text. Such supplemental content may not have the same importance as the original content, but may nonetheless have value to certain users.
In some situations, users may need to be granted access to supplemental content on a selective basis. The supplemental content may be sensitive, and not for widespread distribution. As an example, a business may be willing to publish an employee directory online that includes names and photos, and may be willing to make this available to all employees over an intranet. But it may not be desirable to widely expose certain supplemental content, such as an individual's salary and social security number. Such information may be restricted to certain personnel, such as human resources staff or management personnel. In another example, a business may generate a design specification for purposes of bidding on an engineering contract. Here, the business may wish to include company proprietary information as supplemental content to be shared within the business' engineering department. They may not wish to share this company proprietary information with the firm that is soliciting the bid, however.
In another example, access to supplemental content may be restricted because not everyone in an organization may have the same level of security clearance. A military organization may make a map available to all personnel, but may wish to restrict access to the annotations on the map indicating troop positions. Such annotations would represent supplemental content. Only personnel having the appropriate clearance level should be allowed access to such sensitive supplemental content.
In the context of commercial advertising, a company may wish to present supplemental content to some consumers, but not to all. Here, original content such as an advertisement may be prepared, where the ad includes supplemental content in the form of a coupon code. The company may wish to allow access to the coupon code, but only to existing long-term customers. The company therefore allows selective access to the coupon code, making it available to some consumers, but not to all.
Present technology may allow for convenient general distribution of electronic content, but may not allow for the controlled, selective distribution of associated supplemental content. Enterprise security and privacy requirements may demand supplemental content to be inaccessible to unauthorized parties and be protected from being unlocked and exposed even when detected by an unauthorized application or person.
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